I am a landlord and am really worried about my profits dropping since April’s tax changes.

I currently use a letting agent to market and manage my properties but it's pretty expensive for what I get.

I’m wondering whether I should ditch them and start advertising myself through one of these cheap online sites where I just connect with tenants directly. What are the risks and should I do it as it will save me a lot of money?

There are real risks attached to renting your home on the same platform you would use to sell trainers

This is Money replies: For landlords eager to put more money in their pocket it can be tempting to decide to take on the job of letting and managing your property yourself.

This is especially the case now, as tax changes start to eat into monthly rental profits, with the beginning of the removal of full mortgage interest tax relief and the end of an automatic wear and tear allowance.

Yet, it's important to weigh up the extra work that you will have to do, whether you are willing to commit to it, and also the legal requirements for landlords that a letting agent would normally look after for you.

If you are happy to do all that, then becoming a DIY landlords is possible. If not, then be wary of taking it on.

You'll need to advertise, do viewings and paperwork, take a deposit and abide by the rules, ensure the property is safe, do check-in and an inventory - and then get a network of tradespeople that means you can get a plumber round immediately in an emergency.

In comparison to this, typical letting agent fees are charged in three brackets:

Tenant finding and setting up the tenancy

Tenant finding, set up and collecting rent

Full management: here the letting agent does all the work and it is hands-off

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Costs for all of these services vary, with tenant finding typically setting landlords back about a month's rent, a rent collection service taking a cut of about 5 per cent per month, and full management costing between 10 and 15 per cent of monthly rent.

Often charges will be expressed as a percentage of annual rent, or of the length of the tenancy, but charged monthly.

Some online letting agents will do some of the work above for less - often charging a flat fee. It is also work seeking out smaller boutique letting agents and asking them what they can do for you that a big high street agent cannot.

The best of these smaller agents pride themselves on their bespoke service and in the years of relationships they build up with landlords and tenants. That can be worth paying for.

It's considerably easier to let your own property nowadays, but there are traps to beware

Fareed Nabir, chief executive of LetBritain, replies: With landlord incomes now facing the double hit of April’s tax changes and an additional £300million in agency fees, if recent government plans for a ban on charging letting fees to tenants comes into force, the question of letting affordability and worrying landlords across Britain.

Today’s tenants are more numerous and mobile than ever before, so it’s easy to see the appeal of cheap online listing sites such as Gumtree and Spareroom – platforms that arguably capture a critical mass of the UK’s rental population.

The format is seemingly good enough; from the comfort of your own home, you can instantly list your property – at minimal to zero cost – and get it in front of a vast pool of potential tenants, without having to deal with potentially uncommunicative or extortionately priced letting agents.

Nabir: You could consider an online service which conducts background checks just as comprehensive as those done by letting agents - for a fraction of the cost

However, as with all things deemed too good to be true, they often are.

There are real risks attached to renting your home on the same platform you would use to sell trainers.

According to the Department for Justice, in the first three months of this year alone, 35,188 UK landlords were forced to take legal action against their tenants.

Of the 26,009 tenants ordered by the courts to leave, almost a third of these refused to budge until the bailiffs arrived at the front door – highlighting that landlords are now more exposed to loss than tenants.

The average eviction takes 41 weeks, during which time not only will you potentially face lost rental income from a disastrous tenancy - impacting your ability to pay your mortgage - but you may also have to bear additional legal, insurance and refurbishment costs.

Completing an eviction can cost up to £2,000 and may take up to a year, with damages to your property placing a considerable burden upon your insurance premiums.

With UK entering a new era of digital tenancies, these figures underline the need to marry the ease and efficiency of online solutions with the essential security of comprehensive tenant verification processes.

Rather than online sites that do not specialise in property rentals and therefore lack any process of tenant verification, you could consider an online service which conducts background checks just as comprehensive as those done by letting agents - for a fraction of the cost.

Be sure to research landlord-friendly online property letting platforms to ensure that you aren’t paying exorbitant fees for a poorly communicated, base level of due diligence.

Nick Marr, co-founder of TheHouseShop.com, argues that with more and more tenants falling victim to scam landlords, websites that don't demand checks from both sites are losing the best tenants.

Marr: Online security and fraud prevention is becoming an increasingly important concern for safety-conscious home-hunters

He said: As landlords’ profits are squeezed by Government-imposed tax relief cuts, stamp duty surcharges and a potential increase in letting agency costs as a result of the tenant fees ban – more and more private landlords are turning to DIY online platforms to find tenants for their properties.

However, many of the classified ad sites commonly used by such landlords offer little-to-no security checks to verify the authenticity of adverts.

Unfortunately, these sites have therefore become favourite targets for scammers looking to secure up-front payments from tenants for properties that they either do not own, or that never existed to begin with.

Recent estimates from Shelter show that as many as 250,000 renters have fallen victim to rental fraud and scams in the past five years – with almost 50,000 victims in the past 12 months alone.

It is estimated that bogus landlords are making a whopping £775million through rental scams, with an average cost per victim of roughly £2,400, showing the scale of the damage caused by scammers.

Online security and fraud prevention is becoming an increasingly important concern for safety-conscious home-hunters, especially for the thousands of tenants looking for private landlord properties that they will not find on the big agent-only portals.

Recent YouGov research we commissioned found that the majority of Brits said they would be more likely to use a property website that runs a variety of checks to verify the identity of advertisers and confirm property ownership details.

Interestingly, older age groups were the most cautious when it came to fraud prevention and online security, with 24 per cent of 45-54 year olds and 29 per cent of over 55’s saying they are much more likely to use a property site with additional security checks.

It’s been almost a year since we launched our mandatory Land Registry ownership verification check and we have now built up thousands of verified private rental listings on the site.

We are finding that more and more of our traffic is coming from tenants using Google to track down private landlords, and being able to provide a safe and secure platform for renters to engage with landlords directly has been a huge achievement for us.

Home-hunters are becoming increasingly concerned about online safety and security, and these concerns are impacting which sites they choose to use.

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